History

Pascal became popular very quickly because the original compiler was designed to be very easy to Port. It was written in Pascal and compiled to ByteCodes, called P-Code. All anyone had to do to get a Pascal compiler working on a new machine was to write the simple P-Code VirtualMachine for it -- they could hack the compiler around to generate proper MachineCode later. This meant that Pascal spread very quickly through the world's Universities. They soon began teaching in Pascal -- it was a very good language for demonstrating structured programming, a hot topic at the time.

Standard Pascal was a nice language with terrible limitations: Pascal programs could not open files by name, could barely handle strings and could only pass arrays of predetermined sizes to functions. BrianKernighan famously described Pascal's problems in Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. (It has to be noted that NicolasWirth had already addressed most of Pascal's problems in his follow-up language Modula2before Kernighan wrote this paper, and in some places Kernighan seems to be just complaining that Pascal is not C.) At any rate, these limitations meant that Pascal splintered into dialects as people hacked in missing features in incompatible ways. C did not have this problem, so it gradually took over from the Pascal dialects.

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